Spiritual development is not supposed to leave us lingering in a static condition.  Idealistic philosophy and developmental psychology both tell us we are meant to evolve through higher and higher stages until we reach the nirvana of total unity with spirit.

True enlightenment is rare, but we’re all familiar with examples of those who operate from Stage Five or Six -- people like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Schweitzer, Dag Hammarskjold, Elie Wiesel, Mother Theresa, or any other number of people made famous on the world stage, or who have toiled quietly in our local communities.  These people show us by example that with the right intention and a little effort, those of us living the abundant life of the 21st century should be able to grow into an integral worldview that will make possible the creation of a new age of harmony.

But alas, we spiritual idealists have difficulty developing past Stage Four to the more mature, engaged spirituality of Stage Five.  We’ve become stuck in place, and it’s not in the profoundly deep “staying present and working our way down to reality” place.  It’s more of a flat “I should be able to do—or not do—whatever I want” ego-centered place. 

We’re stuck, and there’s no getting around it, not when the evidence is all around us.  Our technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, but our social systems, our institutions, our politics, along with our general approach to problems, are all still the same.  Socially, not a lot has changed since the 1970s, despite our common acknowledgement that these systems have failed us.  In his brilliant book Community: The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block calls us a “stuck community,” trapped in a system that doesn’t work despite a fervent desire for change.  

We’re stuck, and the reason, according to Wilber, has everything to do with the how Stage Four idealism—which emerged in the West on a large scale for the first time with the Baby Boom Generation—has been flattened by the weight of our postmodern culture.  We’re stuck because of “flatland idealism.”

Trapped in flatland

When we first develop into Stage Four, or what Susan Cook-Greuter calls the Individualist stage, we naturally experience a new sense of freedom from the confining absolutism preached by Stage Two fundamentalism and Stage Three scientism. We finally understand that truth is relative to point of view, that no one person or tradition has a monopoly on truth, and that what we see depends on where we stand. 

This is a big step that allows us to explore many different paths, which many of us do.  Pagan nature worship or aboriginal shamanism or Celtic Christian mythology or the Hindu sutras or the Jewish Kabbalah – we can dip into many traditions because we understand that all have a rightful place on the greater spectrum of truth.  And they are all, in the Stage Four Individualist view, equally true and valid.    

This pluralistic respect is all very well and good, not to mention a necessary step in our spiritual growth.  The problem is that the New Age became enthralled with this view, and took pluralistic respect to extremes, elevating what should be flexible relativism to hard and adamant dogma. 

Instead of understanding that no one person has a monopoly on truth, we now believe each of us has a self-validated monopoly on truth.  As no one else can see through my eyes, I am never wrong about what I see -- nor how I interpret it.  In the New Age, no matter what I believe, I am always right “for me,” my truth is always true, and no other idealist would dare point out my errors.

This is the positive Western all-men-are-created-equal expression of idealism, but even the more negative Eastern approach ends up in the same place. Buddhism and Advaita tell us that all views are illusory thought-constructs, and they are all equally valid because they are all equally invalid.  We each dream up our own particular story of reality and no one story is any more real than any other.

Either way, because all views have equal validity, we cannot possibly claim that any one person’s truth is higher or more developed than any other.  All truths exist on the same flat plane, and stages of growth are ruled out by default.  One cannot grow into a higher stage if one is required to deny that higher stages even exist.  In the flatland of relativism there is literally nowhere to go, no progress to make.  If our view changes, we assume we have merely switched to another spot that is ultimately no better or worse than the one we held before. 

“Nothing is better, nothing is higher, nothing is deeper, all stances are equal in this egalitarian mush,” writes Wilber. 

This self-perpetuating, either/or Stage Four relativism has left us all in a state of arrested development.   We don’t evolve up the spiral; in fact, we reject the very idea of a spiral as an elitist hierarchy.  Instead, we float around on currents of relative truth that go nowhere, and become sitting ducks for an epidemic that runs rampant through Stage Four.  This epidemic is a virus of the ego, and it is well known as narcissism.

The New Age meets ego

A thousand years ago, Padmasambhava, the great Buddhist teacher who brought Buddhism from India to Tibet, predicted a long dark age in which “we could create myriad ways to keep ourselves entertained, becoming experts in how to spend free time,” says the Tibetan teacher Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, writing in Shambhala Sun (January 2009).    Padmasambhava saw that “we would use our intellect not for betterment, but for hanging out in one form of distraction or another, constantly on holiday.”  And as we became more clever, “compassion would seem increasingly futile and we would forget how to bring meaning to our lives.”

The great teacher’s prescient words perfectly describe Western society today.  So in talking about ego-run-amuck narcissism, we should probably first recognize that it is not uniquely a New Age problem, but is in fact, a problem widespread in Western culture, especially as it manifests in the United States.  As Peter C. Whybrow notes in American Mania, our nation was built on “a foundation of unbridled self-interest and commercial freedom.”  Americans, he adds, are continually seduced by capitalism into unseemly “orgies of self-indulgence.”

The irony is that New Age spirituality is meant to rescue us from the rampant self-interest of Western culture.  Idealism, more than any other philosophy, attempts to shine a light on the ego’s games and help us learn to see through them so that we may free ourselves of the ego’s painful tightness and discover our true self, the soul.  But in the New Age, our backwards understanding of relativism has become an ego inflater instead of the ego dissolver it was meant to be.

Now first let me say there’s nothing wrong with a healthy ego.  In fact, we cannot transcend an ego that is not strong and healthy -- and an undeveloped and crippled ego can keep a person trapped in Stage One for a long and difficult lifetime. 

However, an ego that protects and feeds itself with spiritual principles is truly a wonder to behold.  The ego insinuates itself as spiritual advisor and does it so brilliantly that we never suspect what’s really happened.  The ego is then able to feast on its own whims and desires (now called spiritual “intuitions”), completely unhindered by the wide expanse of flatland idealism. 

This is why, more than any other segment of society (with the exception of those caught in Stage One chaos), we Stage Four New Agers tend to do what we please, when we please, for ourselves and more often than not, only ourselves. Because our spiritual imperative is: “I do my thing, and you do your thing,” we feel little responsibility for others.  And of course, no one can ever tell me we’re wrong, because “I’m always right for me.” 

In the New Age, the ego is fat, happy and justified—and obviously in control.  That is one reason we see a glut of “you create your own reality” material like the 2007 bestseller The Secret. The well-fed ego not only controls us, it’s quite certain it can control reality itself.  And so we see millions of manifestation books flying off the New Age shelves in bookstores across the nation.  At a time we are desperately needed out in the larger world to work together for peace and economic justice and solutions to global warming, a New Ager is more likely to be sitting at home, trying to manipulate spiritual “laws” into manifesting a bigger house or a new car. This is New Age narcissism at its most blatant.

Sadly, an ego that is overdeveloped is just as confining as an underdeveloped one, and all but impossible to transcend.   

The ego's brilliant maneuvers

I had a very tough time facing this truth.  I’d heard the narcissism accusation flung at the New Age many times, but I was sure if it was deserved, then it was all those other people who were guilty of it, not me.  I myself felt so well-intentioned and earnest and wanted only good for everyone -- in addition, of course, to a bigger house. 

Most of us can say the same about other idealistic-types we know, basically good people all, with loving hearts and a heartfelt desire to see positive change in the world.  But how often is this desire translated into concrete action?  The amount of our efforts on behalf of others is the true test of independence from ego, and even the most seemingly “spiritual” people can fail this test.  

Consider the words of one of my favorite authors in an otherwise lovely book on Eastern-style spirituality.  She first recalls her unenlightened days as a “radical leftist, determined to save the world.”  Back then, watching the news was too “painful” for her.  But after years of meditation and spiritual practice, she is happy to report she “woke from the dream” and can now watch the news.

“I’ve noticed there is no impulse anymore to save the world.  Watching the nightly horrors, I rarely get upset… There is as kind of equanimity now, an acceptance that didn’t used to be here.  The news seems like a movie, a conjuring act by the newscasters, with stories and emotions blowing past like wisps of cloud or smoke in the wind.”

Happily unaffected by the suffering of others, she next describes herself as spending most of her time “doing nothing,” sitting in her “bliss chair,” gazing out the window, feeling “little ambition to do anything more than be quiet.” She then suggests that the desire to be helpful to others is an effort to “fill the empty hole in the self.”  She is pleased that she has been able to switch her focus from what should be happening to what is happening. 

Contrast this with Ken Wilber’s description of the integral viewpoint of Stage Five spiritual growth: 

"When you are alive with an integral vision, you will work your fingers to the bone, tread the earth until your feet are torn and tattered, shed lonely tears from dawn to solemn dusk, labor ceaselessly until all God’s children are liberated into the vast expanse of freedom and fullness that is every being’s birthright."

Idealism has long recognized this tension between the absolute and the relative, and tried to find a balance between surrendering to what is, and taking responsibility for it.  Wilber adds that it’s not uncommon for well-meaning idealists to “confuse” the directives of the non-dual path -- which teaches the wisdom of detachment -- with the obligations of the relative path, which requires us to work for the good of all. Detachment from outcome is wisdom; detachment from the world and other people is escapism. 

This confusion pops up again and again for those in Stage Four just learning how to accommodate relative truths.  Cook-Greuter’s Individualist, high on relative freedom, is usually content to let go of absolute truths, and simply “groove in the moment,” according to one observer.  He or she becomes an “unproductive non-doer… indefinite and impossible to nail down.”  Which is fine for a time, but not as a permanent way of life.  At least not at this point in history, when the viability of life on this planet literally depends on our continued growth up the spiral.

It is imperative that we free ourselves from the spell of relativity—and the gravity of flatland idealism—and allow ourselves to evolve toward the absolute.  The ego will, of course, try to talk us out of this.  The ego much prefers to stand alone and special, and will fight to keep us complacent in Stage Four, the narcissistic individualist stage that feeds the ego so well.  And it will continue to try to win this fight by telling us “by working on ourselves, we are working on the world.”

It’s hard to recognize, even harder to admit, that one’s ego has insinuated itself as one’s spiritual advisor.  But unless we are out there, sleeves rolled up, building community, and working to create the change we want to see, how can we in all honesty say we that are not suffering at least some degree of egoistic narcissism?

I believe it was our own narcissism, bred in part by the New Age movement itself, that finally rendered the New Age obsolete, once and for all.

People who believe themselves to be the center of the universe, people who believe “all I need is me,” no longer care about being part of something bigger, and they certainly don’t need a movement.  And so, drunk on our own self-importance (or blissed out on the non-importance of anything), we New Agers abandoned ship, abandoned the vehicle we had once expected to help us create a better world.  We leapt overboard into the warm waters of me-ness and struck off on our own, each of us in a different direction. 

Sadly, in the process, we also abandoned each other, and more or less left society to rot.  In a world where I do my thing and you do your thing, there are precious few doing “our” thing. 

Instead of working together for the growth and good of all, we have found ourselves completely isolated from each other, trapped inside our own heads, with no obligation to do anything but follow our own “truth.”

Go to "Hitting Spiritual Bottom"